which was that they had been given hundreds of thousands of documents, dispatches from the field in afghanistan and iraq. there was at that point an intimation that there might be more things to come, and was i interested? and, clearly, i was interested. >> smith: over the next four weeks, the times, der spiegel, and guardian reporters pored through the war logs looking for news. there was no one startling headline, but there was lots of rich detail. >> it was a remarkable insight. it was an unvarnished, rich portrait of the daily conduct of two wars. i would argue that you came away with stuff you didn't get in the pentagon papers, because of the... the rawness of the information, the sheer day to day, mundane life of war. >> smith: in their coverage, the papers decided that they would black out the names of any civilian informants working for the us military. but assange had a different idea for his wikileaks' web site. one evening, just days before publication, they confronted him over dinner. >> julian, whose project was to publish the entire data set, was very reluctant to delete those nam